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Camera lucida productions. Accueil. Una biblioteca virtual con libros de arte para leer 'online' y descargar en alta resolución. Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors. In the last years of his life Paul Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them still lifes.

Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cézanne’s artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the “highest” of classical art forms.

You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry.

Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs. You may remember that we featured the site a few years ago, back when it offered 397 whole books free for the reading, including American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915; Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library; and Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Free: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online. If you like reading about visual art but don’t like spending the considerable sums required to build your own library of vintage exhibition catalogues, feel free to borrow from another collector.

Or rather, feel free to borrow from two collectors, both based in New York, both of some repute: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Early last year, we announced that the Guggenheim had made 65 art catalogues [now increased to 99] available for free online, offering “an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Wassily Kandinsky” as well as ” other texts (e.g., Masterpieces of Modern Art and Abstract Expressionists Imagists) that tackle meta movements and themes.”

(That same post includes instructions on how to use the Guggenheim’s archive.)
Download Over 250 Free Art Books From the Getty Museum. Yesterday, we wrote about the Wellcome Library’s opening up of its digital archives and making over 100,000 medical images freely available online.

If you’ve already made your way through this choice selection (or if the prospect of viewing a 19th century leg amputation doesn’t quite pique your curiosity) have no fear. Getty Publications just announced the launch of its Virtual Library, where readers can freely browse and download over 250 art books from the publisher’s backlist catalogue.

The Virtual Library consists of texts associated with several Getty institutions. Readers can view extensively researched exhibition catalogues from the J. Paul Getty Museum, including Paul Cézanne’s late-life watercolours, when the painter raised the still life to a high art (Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, 2004), as well as the woefully underappreciated Flemish illustrations of the 15th and 16th centuries (Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript, 2003).
The Met Museum of Art. Pearltrees Extension. 24symbols - Access a world of free books.